Search Results for: The Death of an Alliance

May 9, 2017

Our grand plans to engage North Korea must learn from their failures and evolve with the evidence

One of my cruel habits lately has been to ask the holdouts who still advocate the economic, cultural, and scientific “engagement” of Pyongyang to name a single significant, positive outcome their policies have purchased at the cost of $8 billion or more, over 20-odd years, as thousands of North Koreans died beyond our view and our earshot. I’ve yet to receive a non-sarcastic answer to that question. Yesterday, I salted this wound by pointing out that the largest remaining engagement...

Categories Appeasement/Propaganda/Sanctions/Subversion/Sunshine
April 26, 2017

How Moon Jae-in rode a wave of violent anti-Americanism from obscurity to power

Like Roh Moo-hyun, the President he served, Moon Jae-in’s ideological origins are found within the leftist lawyers’ group Minbyun (which has since become Pyongyang’s instrument for intimidating North Korean refugees in the South). As lawyers defending left-wing radicals and pro-democracy activists alike against the right-wing dictatorship, Moon and Roh became close friends and law partners in Pusan. Moon went on to become the legal advisor to the Pusan branch of the Korea Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union, a radicalized union...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
April 6, 2017

When North Korean agitprop backfires: A film about a peasant uprising is sowing dangerous ideas

What passes for a feel-good story in one of the world’s bleakest corners? Evidence that the seeds of class warfare are sprouting within a state that has fooled so many gullible leftists into believing that it’s a paradise of socialism. The Daily NK reports that an old agitprop film is inspiring exactly the kind of revolutionary consciousness that Kim Jong-un sees in his cognac-sodden nightmares. The film, “Im Kkoek Jung,” reminds North Koreans that their society has become the very thing the state’s propaganda...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Propaganda/Resistance/Subversion
September 1, 2016

What victory looks like from Pyongyang (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1 David Straub’s “Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea“ has resonated with me in several ways, but none of them more than Straub’s deep ambivalence about Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when I also served there as a young Army officer. Straub admits that in writing his book, he struggled to reconcile, and to show his readers, an honest-yet-fair portrayal of a society that earned his affection, and also caused him much exasperation, even as...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II
August 16, 2016

The Obama administration isn’t following Kim Jong-un’s money. Congress should ask why.

In February and March, respectively, the U.S. Congress and the U.N. Security Council responded to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test with sanctions that were, in theory, an order of magnitude stronger than any sanctions imposed on North Korea until then. Sanctions, of course, are only as good as their enforcement, and in enforcing sanctions against North Korea, the most important rule has always been “follow the money.” Money — along with the contradictions of its political system — has always...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
February 2, 2016

Of the North’s crimes against humanity, the world will ask, “Where was South Korea?”

South Korea’s political left, which has long been divided over whether to be violently pro-North Korean, ideologically pro-North Korean, or merely anti-anti-North Korean, has again blocked a vote in South Korea’s National Assembly on a North Korean human rights law that’s been languishing there since 2005. The law itself is weak bori-cha. It had been watered down until it did little more than fund NGOs seeking direct engagement with the North Korean people. But even as a symbolic gesture, as a...

Categories Human Rights/Japan & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Politics/North-South
August 24, 2015

Korean War II: It’s (probably) over for now, but it’s not over

They came, they talked, and they solved nothing, but after a tense weekend, at least Korea is not at war. As of this writing, it looks like representatives of the two Korean governments will continue to talk and solve nothing, except to calm South Korea’s foreign investors. The North will not admit that it laid the mines that forever maimed Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon, the South will eventually relent on blaring propaganda to a few hundred...

Categories Korean War II
May 27, 2015

Gloria Steinem was right about isolation (of South Africa)

Gloria Steinem can look back on a life of activism that has built deep reserves of good will among many people. Steinem must have spent heavily from those reserves last week, when Women Cross DMZ attracted largely critical media coverage (and I suspect, an even more critical public reaction). As NK News informs us, its events were stamped from the same propaganda assembly line as those put on for the clown-shod Quisling Alejandro Cao de Benos. To what end would...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
December 15, 2014

Can peer pressure do what South Korea’s conscience couldn’t?

Did the U.N. have to care about human rights in North Korea first for South Koreans to care, too? What is it about Michael Kirby that gives him the capacity to move the South Korean government that, say, Ban Ki Moon, Park Geun Hye, and Moon Jae In all lack? Assuming that anything can make a majority of South Koreans give a damn about North Koreans, what would that say about Korean society and its leaders? South Korea’s unification minister...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society
November 21, 2014

South Korea’s illiberal left: authoritarians in the service of totalitarians

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] In America, we have grown accustomed to a political polarity in which we associate “left” with “liberal.” Whatever the merits of that correlation here, it’s useless to any understanding of politics in South Korea, where very few people...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
August 17, 2014

Between surrender and stupid: Regressing toward the mean in a post-Iraq world

As the world’s attention is focused on the disaster in Iraq, let’s take a moment to mourn the last remnants of Syria’s non-extremist, secular rebels, who are facing their final extermination in Aleppo. To Syrians who risked everything for a future worth living in, it’s academic now that Hillary Clinton privately agreed with what I said back in 2011 (last item), when I called for us to arm moderate rebels there. Clinton now says she warned that if we didn’t,...

Categories Geopolitics
February 7, 2014

Open Sources, February 7, 2014

~ 1 ~ ROK, U.S. MILITARIES PREPARE “TAILORED” DETERRENCE: In 2010, North Korea attacked South Korea twice without eliciting any military response at all. If you ask me, that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Bombing a few shriveled conscripts wouldn’t perturb Kim Jong Un a whit. He might even spin that as a great military victory. We have other, non-military options (banking sanctions and subversive information operations) that would deter him much more. Unfortunately, but for understandable reasons, military planners...

Categories Anju Links
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
January 14, 2014

Gates: Roh Moo Hyun was “anti-American” and “a little crazy,” and Lee Myung Bak wanted to bomb the crap out of Kim Jong Il.

This must be the most controversial understatement of the year, so far: Reading a new memoir by former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, South Koreans may be quite surprised by his characterization of the country’s late President Roh Moo-hyun as “a little crazy.” I estimate that approximately 63.8% of them won’t be in complete shock about that. Gates recalls a November 2007 meeting in Seoul with the liberal-minded president, whose diplomatic and security policy is still being debated. He calls...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea/Yeonpyeong Attack
November 7, 2012

Escape from North Korea: An Incremental Review

Nov. 7, 2012. Early in Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Escape from North Korea, you start to find powerful phrases that stay with you — phrases that make you stop reading and chew on them, to extract the full significance of some aspect of life in another reality. I couldn’t help quoting two of them. The first is illuminating: So accustomed are North Koreans to the lack of light that when I asked a North Korean who had settled in an American city...

Categories Books & Films/Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees/Useful Idiocy
October 26, 2012

Open Sources, October 26, 2012

I THINK THIS SAYS IT ALL: “This story may or may not be true.” ——————————————————- CAMP 22 UPDATE: The Daily NK reports on who it believes now occupies the camp, but I still have questions. ——————————————————- USFK TRIES TO REJOIN U.S. ARMY by expressing interest in joining off-peninsula exercises. And in other USFK news, I’m glad to see that Leon Panetta and Kim Kwang-Jin are putting some thought into how to respond to limited North Korean provocations, more than two...

Categories Anju Links
October 19, 2012

Open Sources: North Korea threatens to fire on South Korea; South Korea says it will fire back

NORTH KOREA THREATENS to fire on people, many of them North Korean refugees, for floating leaflet balloons into their former homeland.  Here’s the original, from KCNA: The Western Front Command of the KPA issues following notice upon authorization: 1. Rimjin Pavilion in Phaju City, location from where the puppet forces made public they would send leaflets and its surrounding area will become targets of direct firing of the KPA from now. The location is the origin of provocation which can...

Categories Anju Links